Handcrafted Makrana White Marble Khatu Shyam Ji Shish Wall Panel, 18in

The Khatu shish darshan, carved to hang on a wall

At Khatu in Sikar district, Rajasthan, what the devotee queues for is the shish — the head of Barbarika, given away in daan before the Mahabharata began and blessed by Krishna to be worshipped through Kaliyuga under Krishna's own name. Shyam Baba is shown as the young man he was: a beardless face, full cheeks, eyes open and looking straight back at whoever stands before him. This 18-inch piece keeps to that convention. The face rises in shallow relief out of the panel that carries it and merges back into the stone ground at the jaw, so there is no separate head and no join anywhere on the piece. A carved lotus-petal border rings the oval, a sarpech and kalgi crest crowns it, the mukut carries its peacock plume above the brow, a vertical tilak marks the forehead, and carved flower garlands swag across the lower border.

A shish panel two and a half inches deep

Most home mandirs run out of depth long before they run out of wall. This panel stands 18 inches tall and 14 across but is only about two and a half inches deep, and it hangs rather than sits — so it works above a narrow ledge, inside an alcove too shallow for a seated murti, or on the free wall beside a mandir that is already full. At roughly 17.5 kg it wants a masonry anchor into brick or concrete rather than a drywall plug; the back is dressed flat and recessed for a keyhole fixing so the panel sits close to the wall. If your wall is plasterboard, say so at the enquiry stage and the piece can be thinned or supplied with a ledge instead.

Makrana white marble for the Shyam Baba shish

The stone is Makrana white marble, quarried in Nagaur district about 250 km from Jaipur, where the sculptor families we work with carve it — the same stone the Taj Mahal was faced with. It is a bright neutral white with the faintest warm undertone and a fine crystalline grain, and grey hairline veining is natural to it, so no two blocks read alike. Shallow relief lives or dies on how light crosses it, which is why the surface is taken to a soft satin polish rather than a mirror: enough sheen to lift the lotus petals and the garland work, not so much that reflections flatten the modelling of the face.

Commissioning your Khatu Shyam panel

Every piece is made to order. Tell us the wall you have in mind and the size is worked to it — this panel reads well anywhere from 12 inches up to about 30, and beyond that it becomes a temple-scale commission. A fresh commission takes 8 to 12 weeks, depending on how much of the border and garland work you want cut. If your date falls sooner, say so rather than settling: a carved piece may already exist with one of the sculptor families we work with, and we will ask and send you photographs of the actual piece before you decide. We design it with you, brief the sculptor, and follow it through to delivery at your door.